So this was an interesting weekend. Family came over for a mini vacation. I decided to show my brother one of my side projects while he was here. Me and a friend are attempting to make a cheap aerial photo / video platform using a high powered RC plane and GoPro cameras. While launching the plane, I made the mistake of leaving my hand up when calling "clear" and the prop mangled up my right index and middle fingers, so looks like I wont get to do any hardware mods for a while longer. /sighWarning: Finger Gore Photo!(Click to show)

Fingers all bandaged up!

Decided to work on the CPU meter today. Figured I could do it without messing up my fingers.

Then I installed LCD Smarty. Enabled only screen 1 (disabled all other screens). Changed the "Display Plugin" to "testdriver.dll". Then I changed the "Startup Parameters" to "COM3,9600,8,N,1" Then under the "Screen" tab I changed the LCD Size to "2x16". Finally in the config.ini I added the following lines after the "[General Settings]" section:

With this on an Arduino Uno R3 it takes the data from the LCD Smarty program and sends it to an analog meter. You can have 1 meter for CPU usage (pin 5) and another one for RAM usage (pin 3). Also I made it so that if you have a 5v LED light (pin 12), it will illuminate when you get to 80% CPU usage. (ground is common)

This build is made of win. If you can get it a rusty paint job at the end, it will be totally awesome, like this (but with WAY less orange, you want it banged up, but not like it got sunk along with the Titanic)